Krunk4Ever!

So for the longest time (and Derek can be my witness), I’ve wanted a Friends Suggester feature in Facebook. What a Friends Suggester is is a tool that’ll automatically suggest people who you might know based on who your friends are. In other words, typically if 5 of your friends know a particular person that isn’t your friend yet, there is a likely chance this particular person is someone you know too.

Anyway, when Facebook Apps were starting, I thought an app like this would quickly show up. At first we thought it wasn’t possible due to privacy reasons, but it turns out that your friends list is typically open to public and all the app would need is just the list of friends of all your friends and then do some mashing work.

When Facebook introduced Suggest A Friend, I thought that was what I was looking for. However, it turns out it was meant so you as a human (and not the computer) to suggest friends to new people on Facebook.

A week or 2 ago, Facebook finally added what’s been long overdue: People You May Know:

People You May Know
Found based on your existing connections

Do you know any of these people?
Add people you know as friends to make these results even better for you.

This is exactly what Friends Suggester is. It shows you a list of people that it thinks you might know and even shows the list of common friends between you two. I’ve already added 5+ friends since I found this tool.

There are still some ways to improve it. Currently they only suggest 25 people randomly to you. If you refresh the page, the list changes with some new and some old. There appears to be no order of any sort and algorithm to determine which people you’re more likely to be friends with. I’d say the more friends you share between each other, the more likely you two are friends. Having the ability to see ALL suggested friends, even if it iterates over many pages, would be nice. Sitting here hitting refresh hoping to find a friend that may pop up after awhile just isn’t that great.

Another thing they should add is the ability to discard people you don’t know. No matter how many times you show me person A, if I don’t know him, I’m not going to add him to my friends list. There is the case where you might end up being friends later, so maybe the ability to ignore a particular person for 3 months or 6 months would be another option.

All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with this new tool so far.

Update:

I knew I forgot something. I had also wanted it to automatically email me when it thinks a new possible friend pops up in the list or alert me somehow. However it turns out they already have this feature. I just got this email:

_____ just joined Facebook. You are getting notified of this because our “People You May Know” tool discovered you and _____ both work at Microsoft. If you do know _____, check out the links below.

To add _____ as a friend, follow this link:
____________________

To view _____’s profile, follow this link:
____________________

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

So SueOn asked me this question earlier:

do you ever sleep?
or are you like chuck norris
you just wait

That reminded me of the Zuckerberg testimonies I was reading earlier. Apparently the court files for the case when Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) was sued for stealing the social networking idea from another student group were accidentally released to a journalist/reporter. According to Facebook Founder Finds He Wants Some Privacy:

Social networking Web sites can seem dedicated to the idea that nobody’s personal life is worth keeping private, but when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg — the founder of Facebook, one of the largest networks — Facebook disagrees.

Facebook tried last week to force the magazine 02138 to remove some unflattering documents about Mr. Zuckerberg from its Web site. But a federal judge turned down the company’s request for a court order to take down the material, according to the magazine’s lawyers.

The dispute stemmed from a lawsuit charging that in 2003 and 2004, as a student at Harvard, Mr. Zuckerberg stole the idea and some of the computer source code for Facebook from some fellow students. They were planning a networking site of their own and had hired Mr. Zuckerberg to help with the programming.

You can read the original article on 02138: Poking Facebook:

Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg created one of the most trafficked sites on the Web and became a paper billionaire as a result. But ongoing lawsuits suggest that Facebook’s origins are murkier than Zuckerberg would like to admit. Is the man many are calling Harvard’s next Bill Gates telling the truth?

and here are the court documents from the Facebook trial: The Facebook Files.

How does this relate to the the question SueOn had asked me? In one of his testimonies, the transcript goes as below (Q = question/attorney and A = answer/Zuckerberg):

Q: Okay. What time did you wake up in the morning?
A: It probably wasn’t the morning.
Q: Okay. How late did you stay up programming?
A: I don’t know, like it’s quiet at night.
Q: Okay.
A: You can get work done.
Q: Did you work all night sometimes?
A: Yeah. I mean although, I guess that’s relative when you’re shifted hours like that.

You can say I’m pulling all nighters every day, but that’s because I go to sleep in the early morning (4-6am).

The testimony got boring really fast, though I will say that he sounded quite scared and his replies reminded me of someone who wasn’t really a profession, but brand new to the field.